Drive Wiper

I want to use Drive Wiper to clean my C Drive free space which is about 1TB in size.

Is 1 overwrite enough to keep file recovery software from recovering old deleted files?

I am not worried about a lab being able to restore the data...just the average person if my computer was stolen.

I wasn't securely deleting files in the past but will now.

I really am hoping not to have the process of cleaning free space take too many hours but will if needed.

Thank You for any help.

Wiping a 1TB drive is going to take a very long time. Here's something for you to consider: Just how many gigabytes of data do you have on that 1TB partition? Does it really have to be that big? I currently have around 50GB of data on a 200GB partition for C: drive. More than enough room, and if I need more, I can extend the partition. If you decide to shrink your C: partition, keep one thing in mind: you should go into your system recovery settings and allocate a larger percentage in order to maintain the same amount of disk space for your system restore points. (2% of 1000GB=20GB and 10% of 200GB=20GB, understand?)

That is something I think I will do...right now I want to overwrite old deleted data first and was wondering if the 1 pass simple overwrite is good enough to keep consumer data recovery software from working?

I started the 3 pass option but that was going to take about 9 hours.

I just want to keep the average person with data recovery software from recovering personal info if my computer is stolen.

(Not worried about the NSA etc.)

Also, will the drive wiper work on flash drives...I heard that formatting them does not securely erase data.

Thanks for the help.

Yes, one pass is absolutely sufficient for overwrites. Yes, Drive Wiper will work on flash drives, it's essential to use only one pass. Search this forum for all the arguments.

If your pc is pinched then the felons will be able to see all your live files, won't they?

Thanks for your help.

I have my personal files encrypted now but didn't berfore.

I just deleted the old ones and didn't securely erase them...that is why I needed to wipe the free space.

Does what you are saying mean that I can set ccleaner to clean regularly with just one overwrite and that is secure?

If so, why do they offer the other options?

Thanks

+1 with @Augeas, one pass is all you need, it's not perfect, but as you say, good enough for the average joe.

it makes data recovery all that much harder - but not impossible.

the reason they offer more is there are a surprisingly large number of PC users who take their data security to a whole new level of "enthusiasm".

Thanks all for your help.

This is the info I needed.

Thanks Again

It's all nonsense really. I guess Piriform offer these silly multiple overwrites because everybody else does, so the software is seen as more 'complete'.

If you want to be a smarty pants then consider that overwrites are cumulative, and can't be peeled back layer by layer. So if data has been written to your disk sectors 50 times by normal use prior to you writing your very important data, and you overwrite the VID once, then it's exactly the same as a 50 times overwrite.

Every time you write data to a disk you're doing a multi, multi overwrite of what was there before.